The links between the first world war and literature are enshrined in our culture: the war poets are taught in schools, and their descriptions of the horrors of the trenches have entered – and to an extent informed – our national consciousness. But why was it this war, above all others, that found its way into words?

The reasons are various. First, and possibly foremost, was the arrival of a new sort of soldier to chronicle the battlefield. Historian John Terraine puts it eloquently: "There was a very large, highly-motivated middle-class element. By definition, that element was reasonably, sometimes very well, educated. Its sensitivities were recognisably cultivated. It was, generally speaking, highly articulate. And in the shock of the experience that it was about to undergo we may find, in my opinion, the true seat of the British trauma." Before 1914, of those who described war, painted it and wrote poetry about it, very few had seen battle themselves. Now a generation of the literary middle class had, and found it by turns mundane, draining and horrific.

But while the most famous war poets – Sassoon, Owen and Graves – were all middle-class officers, there were also, crucially, many other voices. Kitchener's drive for volunteers had been abundantly successful: by the end of 1914 more than a million men had signed up to fight the Kaiser. Two-and-a-half years later Britain introduced, for the first time in its history, conscription. A generation went to war, with the ability to do something that few men on the ground had been capable of before: write.

Since the Victorian education reforms, mass literacy meant historians would have the letters and diaries of regular men to work with. Men from the ranks were moved to describe their experiences: Ivor Gurney, for example, a private and a poet whose bipolar disorder was profoundly exacerbated by his experiences of the war, and whose work stands alongside Frederic Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune which writes the details of army life at war from the bottom up. Published in the late 1920s as the public's disgust with the loss of life in the first world war grew, Manning portrayed the experiences of ordinary soldiers between two battles during the Somme campaign. They sat around drinking and swearing and confiding: not heroes but ordinary men in an extraordinary situation waiting for something awful to happen to them.

Elsewhere, meanwhile, women such as Vera Brittain were giving voice to the experiences of field nurses with "no more beds available for prisoners, stretchers holding angry-eyed men in filthy brown blankets occupied an inconvenient proportion of the floor."

Nor was it just Britain that had an army as comfortable with a pen as a bayonet. In France in 1916, Henri Barbusse published Under Fire, one of the few accounts to come out while the war still raged. Barbusse had become a pacifist because of his experiences and the publication of his book, which introduced the reading public to the horrors of trench warfare for the first time, proved controversial with the French leaders trying to convince their countrymen to keep fighting.

Less aggravating for his superiors was a book by a German soldier who had already won the highest accolade of the Pour le Mérite as a young lieutenant. Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel is still highly regarded by those with little time for weedy poets moaning about a bit of shrapnel. Jünger loved the war, thought it was a grand time, and really couldn't believe his good luck in being involved in such an escapade. As he said in the preface to a 1929 English edition: "Time only strengthens my conviction that it was a good and strenuous life, and that the war, for all its destructiveness, was an incomparable schooling of the heart."

Manly stuff. Needless to state, Mr Hitler and his chums found it a real page turner. Less popular with the goose-steppers was another German's fictionalised account of the war. Despite eventually being banned and burned by the Nazis, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front became an instant bestseller around the world. It is the one book that provided a continuing market for the others mentioned here. It spawned a new literary movement in books condemning the war, making the style suddenly fashionable in the late 20s, just as books about teenage vampires are today. It also inspired the first great war film which set the tone for what would follow. Future conflicts – the second world war, Vietnam, Iraq – would all inspire more great celluloid than pages.

The first world war was the first time war was seen and understood by writers, by a whole generation of them, who didn't see it remotely, through chivalrously tinted lenses but in the mud and the blood and the shrapnel. Before the real dawn of cinema and after the birth of literacy, the first world war is the only war that must be read to be understood. Perhaps that's why modern authors such as Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker are still inspired by it today.

The legacy of those writing men that fought is clear; after what they suffered, observed and published, nobody could believe the old lie again.